At the end of every year, it’s important to address the success and challenges your business faced throughout the year. If you had a profitable year, GREAT! Analyze your efforts to determine which worked the best. If business wasn’t as good as you would have liked, now is the time to make changes.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

When creating a marketing plan for Realtors, start by summarizing what you hope to accomplish. This includes a profile of your business model, goals and objectives. If you’re new to the business, it would be beneficial to conduct a market analysis by researching your target market, demographics, and competition.

Once you feel you have a good handle on the what, now you can focus on the how. Without a doubt, marketing is critical to the success of any business, regardless of size or industry. What makes real estate unique is that while you are in the business of selling real estate, your business is selling yourself to potential clients. Here are some ideas to help you do just that:

Branding

Do you have a logo? A motto or catch-phrase? An image?

Strategic Web Design

Having a website isn’t enough. Everyone has a website. You need to have a strategic keyword focus for SEO, custom url’s centered around this keyword or keyword phrase, an intuitive IDX interface, an effective means to capture email addresses, advanced social media integration, original content that is updated daily – best accomplished by blogging, community pages with at least 300 words and hyperlinks to external sites, and more!

Drip Campaign

If you don’t touch people at least once a month, they will forget about you. However, if you contact people too much, they will mark you as spam. Balance and timing are extremely important with respect to emailing. Contact your real estate virtual assistant for advice on this matter.

Social Media

Facebook Business Page, Twitter Page, LinkedIn Page, Pinterest Business Page, Google+…you need them ALL. Why? SEO. Do not trivialize the importance of having social media sites. Not only is this a great way to indirectly prospect, it’s also instrumental in search engine ranking (especially for blogging).

CRM

You can have all the prospects and contacts in the world, but if you don’t keep them properly organized then you may as well have none. REVStaffing has virtual assistants who are well-versed in platforms such as TopProducer, e-Edge and more.

Lead Generation

Do you use RedX or TigerLead? Do you have an account on Trulia and Zillow? Do you blog? Do you have a consistent, yet nonintrusive way to ask for referrals? How do you get leads?